Learning to bask in God’s mysterious, sustaining presence gives life to and guides our efforts, bringing us to the domain of grace that is beyond anything we can achieve on our own. We ripen in holiness and spiritual fulfillment.
As we ripen in intimacies with God, we also ripen in paradoxical wisdom. We begin to understand the Mystery of the Cross, which means that God watches over us, but does not prevent the tragic, the cruel, and the unfair things from happening. That God is intimately hidden as a profound, tender sweetness that flows and intimately carries us along the depths of tragedies; and will continue to do so all through our lives up to and through death, and beyond.
Similar to ripening fruit, we do not undergo the transformative process of ripening for ourselves alone, but our transformation would be a source of nurturing for others too. Then there is the fruit that, in remaining unharvested, falls to the ground and dies.
As we grow old we realize that in all we have been through, love has been using us for its own purposes. We realize that our inevitable “falling to the ground and dying” is not the end of our ripened and transformed life, but our passage into an infinite and deathless fulfillment.
John 12:24 “I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat is planted in the soil and dies, it remains alone. But its death will produce many new kernels—a plentiful harvest of new lives.”
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